On Miller St

It’s nice to go down your driveway and find a painting, which is what I did with this one. Walked out of the door, took a fairly ordinary photo and started painting. Well almost.
I like that chance encounter with the familiar that turns an ordinary moment into a special one, an average day into a great one. It means that there’s always possibilities to redeem an hour, a week, a month or years from the ordinary if that makes sense? Like most things it’s all about your attitude to it.
I’m not much of a photographer, but I can tell from a snap shot whether something might make an okay painting. Why is that? Is it because we’ve all been conditioned to look at digital thumbnails? I can certainly tell the difference between a good photo and a bad photo, although I can’t take a good photo myself.
And why is it that good photos often look terrible if you try to reproduce in a painting? Paintings also look way better ‘in person’ than they do digitally . Digital photos tend to flatten the image and make the image all about tone and not much else. In a thumbnail, you can also see the whole image at once.
If I stand in front of a good painting, my eye is drawn through the image and I focus on individual details, as well as the whole thing. A good painting will often work well at a distance and work equally as well, yet differently, close up.
Anyway what painting gives me, besides a way of recognizing that the ordinary is special, is a mechanism for listening to and externalizing my inner voice. And playing.